The Witch Elm

by Tana French

After dinner Hugo would light a fire in the living room—“I know it’s not a cold night,” he said simply, the first time, “but I love wood fires, and I can’t afford to wait for the winter”—and

—and we would play rummy or Monopoly, among the faded red damask armchairs and old Italian engravings and worn Persian rugs that had been the same all my life, until Hugo got tired and we all went to bed.

Looking back, I’m amazed by how quickly they took shape, those rituals, how solid and smooth and immutable they felt after only a few days; how quickly it came to feel as though we’d been there for years and would be there, all of us, for years more.

“A hippogriff could have dropped it,” Leon said. “On its way to the Forbidden Forest.”

Did you know that the Greeks believed there was one at the gates of the Underworld?”

It sprang up where Orpheus stopped to play a lament after he’d failed to rescue Eurydice.

Virgil says, ‘an elm, shadowy and vast, spreads its aged branches: the seat, men say, that false Dreams hold, clinging beneath every leaf.’”

“I can feel it, you know,” he said. “Just this last week or so. My body turning away from all this. Focusing its energy on doing something else, some new process. Something that I don’t understand and have no idea how to go about, but my body knows and is busy at it.

But they’re doing something too, Toby”—a fierce flick of her head towards the terrace—“they’re trying to do something to you, and I can’t tell what it is but it’s not good. And we need to go home.”

but even without any of that I would have known, because the air around us had split open and whirled and re-formed itself and there was one less person in the room.

Even in that moment I had room to be glad that he had left it so long. Melissa and I had made him happy enough that he had wanted every day he could have.

The last thing I remember thinking is how terribly sad it was that it should be so easy, in the end, to go to sleep.

all the things that Rafferty had explained would work against me, the slurring and the jumpiness and the glazed look and the inability to focus, those were the things that saved me.

I didn’t need Susanna to point out to me that, if I had been some tracksuited skanger from a family of dole rats, the whole thing would have played out very differently.

“I think I was expecting some modern thing. Super-discreet. Something that could be a community center, or a block of flats.

This place is like, ‘Fuck you, we’ve got a madwoman in the attic and we don’t care who knows it.’”

“The exhibition you were working on, when you got bashed? Young Skanger Artists or whatever it was? Deano was one of the artists.”

I can’t stop myself from wondering, with a stunning rush of grief, whether everything since that night has been no more than a last burst of light from a dying star, the last rogue fizzles of electricity along the shorting wires.

I think my luck was built into me, the keystone that cohered my bones, the golden thread that stitched together the secret tapestries of my DNA; I think it was the gem glittering at the fount of me, coloring everything I did and every word I said.

And if somehow that has been excised from me, and if in fact I am still here without it, then what am I?